Greek Elections No Surprise. Don't Blame the Workers

2019

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

Myself and others have made it clear in our contributions to this blog that one of the major factors in the rise of Donald Trump, his election and the increased boldness and violence by white nationalists, fascists and Nazi’s, is the disgraceful role played by the heads of organized labor from the AFL-CIO down.

I write “role” as opposed to “no role” because it’s not that they have done nothing which so many union members and unorganized workers accuse them of. They do a lot; the problem is it is all aimed at suppressing the potential power latent in the 14 million members of the organizations they head. Whether it’s forcing concessionary contracts on workers that resist them or openly sabotaging them and any potential movement from below that threatens their leadership and class collaborationist policies, they are very active in ensuring that when capitalism goes in to crisis, they move to prop it up, to bail it out.

This is their policy on the job, in the economic sphere but also in the electoral arena where they continuously support the capitalist Democratic Party supplying human capital and money to the tune of billions of dollars over decades.  Their refusal to provide an alternative has led to two important developments. One is the abandonment of electoral politics altogether as 100 million or so eligible voters in the US are so disgusted with the situation they have opted out. And the other is among those that do participate, the election of the serial sexual predator and racist Donald Trump. 

As I have pointed out before (as have others on this blog), an important if not crucial lesson we must learn from the recent successes in education, especially West Virginia, is that these victories, some greater than others, and the organizational form they took, were possible because the trade union hierarchy was weaker. These teacher/educators uprisings didn’t take place in states where this entrenched labor bureaucracy is stronger because they had the power to suppress them.

Greece

What has this to do with Greece my fellow workers might ask.  Leadership, that’s what.

The Greek workers have just elected a center right conservative party, New Democracy, to power ousting the left leaning Syriza and its leader, Alexis Tsipras. According to reports, the new Prime Minister and victor, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is a bit of a liberal but New Democracy also has some extreme right wing elements in it. Syriza thrashed New Democracy only 4our years past based on a platform promising to take on the banks and against austerity.

Taking a lesson from the US Predator in Chief, Mitsotakis promises to “energize” the economy and to make Greeks proud again through fewer taxes and inviting in foreign investors which will create growth that will according to him, “….bring better salaries and higher pensions in an efficient state,”

It’s amazing that someone can repeat this same old worn out mantra and with another slump or deep recession around the corner.  Why on Earth would the Greek workers support this?

Well it’s very simple. Syriza, a sort of coalition between various leftist and radical formations had a meteoric rise to power even displacing the Greek Socialist Party as the favorite of the Greek working class. In the 2012 elections, a period of continuing austerity and assault on the Greek working class by the EU, the ECB and the IMF (the Troika), Syriza won 16% of the vote and became the second largest party in the Greek parliament to New Democracy. This situation has now been reversed with the recent elections.

Back in 2015, in ongoing battle and negotiations with the Troika, Tsipras decided to call a referendum on whether or not to accept the most recent bailout conditions on offer the Troika. As anyone that follows politics knows, the IMF, the World Bank, the ECB and other global capitalist institutions impose horrific conditions on the populations of countries that borrow from them. Structural adjustment is another nice sounding term that also extracts blood for money

2015

From all that I read, Tsipras believed the Greek workers would not take a chance at refusing an offer from such powerful global institutions but they did. By a vote 61% to 39%. The result of the referendum was a resounding  "No" vote. New Democracy, last week’s victor, lost its president who resigned due to the party's support of the Troika's horrific bailout offer.

Despite running on an anti-austerity platform, Tsipras and Sytiza capitulated and despite the “no” vote signed a bail out agreement with the Troika a month later that was even worse than the one the Greek workers rejected in the referendum. Sounds just like what happens when rank and file union members reject concessionary contracts forced on them by their leaders and the bosses doesn’t it.  Workers get worn down at the prospect of having to take on their own leaders and withdraw from the union altogether. The Greek workers have responded in a similar fashion as the turnout in this election was only just over 50%. Like the union leaders though, Tsipras was not so much afraid of the Troika, he was afraid of the Greek working class that, through the referendum, asked him and Syriza to fight.

The same process occurred with Trump. For all the talk of the white racist workers that voted for him in McComb County for example, they had previously voted twice for Obama. People close their eyes and ears to what they don’t like if it might get food on the table and pay the rent. There are many black folk who support Obama and simply ignore his murderous foreign policy, a continuation of his predecessors or his immigration policy.  Life is more complicated than the US mass media would like us to think.

We can see this throughout history in politics and in our unions where those heading them betray the working class either consciously or simply through false policies not understanding what has to be done. As Christopher Hill, the British historian put it with regards to the revolutionists that fought the feudal aristocracy and for a permanent political voice, they were initially able only to go so far as their world view, that the king was king by divine right, that he was god’s vicar was such an obstacle. It was their “stop in the mind” as Hill put it. Then Cromwell came along and suggested they cut of his head and see what happens. A new day was born. Our own consciousness is a powerful obstacle to progress at times.

I am not in the habit of attaching the name of a historical figure to my worldview. I fear it because there are many others who adopt the same moniker. I accept as accurate Marx’s understanding of the world and the method of historical materialism. I reject Stalinism as socialism or Communism and respect Trotsky’s defense of the Marxist method and his ideas against Stalinism that cost him his life and the lives of most of his family; like all human beings he was a person of his time and made his share of mistakes.  To paraphrase Marx who once said that whatever I am I am not a Marxist in order to separate himself from the abundance of groupings that called themselves that, I identify myself as a revolutionary socialist. 

Trotsky wrote in 1938 two years before his murder by one of Stalin’s agents that The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.

I think we can say without hesitation that the evidence of how right he was 80 years ago is overwhelming.   The leaders of the working class in the trade unions and the political parties where they exist, are the obstacle to the working class taking power and fulfilling the task that history has set for it.

For more on Greece, hit the Greece or EU tabs to the right.